Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

Students from low-socioeconomic status (SES) who are just starting college are more likely to experience discrimination. Frequent discrimination is associated with harmful effects on students’ well-being, including increased negative mental health symptoms (Hwang & Goto, 2008) and decreased sense of belonging in their college environment (Hussain and Jones, 2021). Discrimination is also associated with greater perceptions of cultural mismatch (Feasel et al., 2023), which occurs when a student’s home culture does not match their university culture. Cultural mismatch also negatively impacts college students’ sense of belonging (Phillips et al., 2020). Given that discrimination and cultural mismatch have similar effects on belonging, the current study tests our hypothesis that cultural mismatch mediates the relationship between SES discrimination and the perceived sense of belonging in low-SES college students. We found support for this mediational model in data analyses from a pre-existing longitudinal study. Students who experienced constant SES discrimination have frequently experienced more cultural mismatch and,as a result, felt less like they belonged during their first three years of college. In a follow-up study, these results were replicated in a cross-sectional study with low-SES college students using a more robust measure of SES discrimination.